The Marquise of Oh!
Heinrich von Kleist’s brief, funny novella, The Marquise of O—, begins in media res, with the titular knocked-up widow placing what we’d now call a personal ad in a local newspaper announcing that “she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him” (p. 68*). Has a story ever begun with a more intriguing premise? The reader is immediately sucked in: who is the daddy? Why doesn’t the Marquise know who the daddy is? Will he come forward? Kleist proceeds to take a leap backward in time, to a few months earlier, when a seemingly civilized (and appropriately named) Russian officer, Count F—, rescues the Marquise from a gang of would-be rapists, then carries her back to her quarters, where she promptly faints. We are led to believe, then, that the Count takes advantage of the lovely Marquise while she lies unconscious. But Kleist’s remarkably restrained, pathologically polite narrator would not dare spell it out for us in crass or explicit terms. Instead, he employs the power of punctuation: “Then — the officer instructed the Marquise’s frightened servants, who presently arrived, to send for a doctor” (p. 70). Please note the dash. Perhaps the author chose it for its resemblance to a mattress, or a divan. In any case, knowing already that the Marquise will soon be in the family way, the reader is more than willing to fill in the blank. What follows is a headlong comedy of manners as the Marquise starts to experience the familiar symptoms of pregnancy while totally ignorant of her condition. As the translators, Luke and Reeves, point out in their Introduction, the basic plot of an unconscious woman raped without her knowledge has “a long, ribald history” (p. 18), from the Greeks to Montaigne. What feels modern even today (and think of how modern it must have been in 1809!) is Kleist’s rock-solid sense of structure and pacing. Imagine the story without that opening section about the advertisement. We would not be on the lookout for a surreptitious insemination, and thus would not be able to put two and two together (otherwise, Kleist would have had to explicitly show us Count F—‘s foul deed). As constructed, the story allows the reader to remain one step ahead of the Marquise and her family—and, in lock-step with the Count, a curious position in that we can’t help but emphasize with him as he tries so hard to atone for his assault by wooing the marquise. “Go on!” we want to tell her, “Accept his proposal. He’s the guy who will eventually answer your ad, anyway!” But Kleist, like a skilled writer of situation comedies, stalls and complicates, withholding the inevitable happy ending until the final sentence. This teasing is made bearable, even pleasurable, by the breakneck pacing. Paragraphs go on endlessly, each one packed to overflowing with incident. One paragraph lasts from pages 81 to 85, as the Marquise’s baffled family attempts to come to terms with Count F—’s inexplicable (to them) obsession with the heroine, which has led him to jeopardize his career and reputation. During this long section the reader (unlike the Marquise) knows that the woman is pregnant and that the Count is here to do the honorable thing, and this knowledge fuels the momentum as scene is piled upon scene until the Count finally leaves town under the mistaken impression that the Marquise’s hand will be his when he returns. The rollercoaster pacing is also due to the author’s reliance on summary. He provides only what is absolutely necessary to keep the story in motion—no descriptions of the Marquise’s dresses, the Colonel’s elegant home, the rolling Italian countryside. In a few short lines on page 73, for example, we are informed that the Marquise’s family have had to move from the citadel to a house in town, where they “reverted entirely to their former way of life,” with the Marquise resuming her children’s education, as well as her hobbies of painting and reading—though she is now “afflicted with repeated indispositions” (i.e., morning sickness). A different author may have written a scene about the family’s move, with the Marquise directing the movers to be careful of the armoire, or a scene depicting her instruction of the children in the Greek classics. But Kleist keeps the ball rolling, often summarizing dialogue as well. And while this extensive use of summary may have been typical of the time, Kleist’s use of direct speech, however selective, was apparently unique (according to Luke and Reeves, p. 18). Pages 87-90 are mostly taken up by dialogue as the Marquise and her mother carry on a conversation about the possibility (or impossibility) of the daughter’s apparent condition. Kleist repeats this tactic on pages 103-4, with another dialogue-heavy scene between mother and daughter. These two episodes, which function almost like scenes from a play, contrast sharply with the rest of the story in that the narrator sits back and allows the action to play itself out in real time. Thus, the mother/daughter relationship takes on more significance than any other in the tale, which is appropriate in that it is the mother who, first, complicates the situation by banishing her inappropriately pregnant daughter, and, second, devises a way to get at the truth and ultimately vindicate her.
And finally, a word about the narrator who so skillfully keeps the story afloat. He is omniscient, but unlike the omniscient narrators of, say, Laughter in the Dark, or The Assistant, this one does not much bother with inner dialogue. Occasionally, he might dip into the Marquise’s head (“the turmoil and anguish of her heart ceased,” p. 93), or her mother’s (“she wiped away her own tears, wondering whether the violent emotional upheaval she had caused him might not be dangerous,” p. 103), but they are not prolonged glimpses into their souls. The narrator much prefers to keep the action hurtling, with a just enough psychological insight to keep the characters real, toward the story’s satisfying conclusion
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